‘Cocaine users continually wander the streets...

An around-the-clock battle against cocaine is raging practically in the shadow of City Hall.

Ubiquitous drug dealers and users have claimed turf between 5th and 7th streets, along Spring Street and Broadway. The center of the drug trafficking, police charge, is the landmark Alexandria Hotel at 5th and Spring streets, but drug sales and use also abound in the streets and alleys around the hotel.

And now the heat is on. In recent months, police from Central Division have not only been sweeping through the Alexandria, but have been scouring nearby streets and alleys.

Last week, city officials warned the Alexandria’s owners that unless the dealers were purged from the once-elegant hotel, they would ask a judge to close it.

Police believe that the hotel has become a command center for the crack invasion and is increasingly becoming a source of cocaine that is sold in other parts of Los Angeles.

‘Highways’ for Dealers

Officer John Emmett Smith, 26, who has fought pitched battles with suspected drug dealers in the hotel’s corridors, charged that its “stairs act as ‘highways’ for narco dealers going from floor to floor.”

Martin Yacoobian Jr., who manages the 512-room Alexandria for his parents, becomes agitated when he hears such talk. He says his family’s hotel has, in effect, been made a scapegoat for cocaine problems rooted in the streets and not inside the Alexandria.

“Why don’t (the police) keep (Spring Street) clean?” he asked during a recent interview. “I cannot go out single-handedly and clean up the street.”

The Alexandria, he claims, has been overwhelmed by a recent cocaine invasion that has swept into a neighborhood that is a short walk from the city’s political, commercial and financial centers.

‘Central Spot’ for Cocaine

The police view of his hotel as the area’s crack trafficking hub, he says, “is highly exaggerated.” Smith, however, said Yacoobian could not be more wrong.

“I know that narcotics is being rocked (produced) in that hotel, that it’s being transported down the stairs and that it’s being sold on the streets,” he said Friday in a telephone interview. “It is the central spot in the Central Area for cocaine.”

To underscore his point, Smith said, “I went over to the hotel (Friday morning) and saw two (cocaine traffickers) in the lobby I had (previously) arrested.”

Played Key Role

Smith, who patrolled the Alexandria’s corridors for more than a year searching for crack dealers and buyers, played a key role in providing evidence to city prosecutors trying to clean up the hotel.

Bill Bushnell, the artistic producing director of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, across the street from the Alexandria, said the hotel may be the focus of current police activities, but that the stakes far transcend the Alexandria.

For the investors and businessmen who have put money into vacant and decaying Spring Street properties in an effort to save the rag-tag area, and to profit from any revitalization, Bushnell said the battle has reached a critical phase “to reclaim $10 billion worth of real estate.”

Pivotal to that victory, as the police see it, is to secure the Alexandria against the traffickers. The solution, they believe, depends on stepped-up police drug sweeps.

Last Wednesday evening, the Alexandria was dramatically quiet as a reporter checked in. Its frayed lobby--which police charge is usually bustling with drug dealers and prostitutes--was almost empty.

Fourteen private security guards--about three times the hotel’s normal number--kept a high profile in and around the building, checking the identification of anyone who wanted to enter the hotel and asking whether they were a guest or wanted to patronize the restaurant or bar.

Such precautions were unheard of when the Alexandria was one of the most notable hotels in the country.

Shortly after its construction in 1906, the hotel became host to some of the city’s most glittering parties and was a temporary home for visitors with international reputations. Former President Woodrow Wilson, Enrico Caruso, Sarah Bernhardt and Charlie Chaplin had suites there. Orchestra leader Paul Whiteman played there. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks enjoyed its parties.

Now, police and prosecutors say, the Alexandria is host to a darker side of life.

Police routinely patrol the hotel’s eight-story main building and its 12-story annex. Last Wednesday night, two officers, Manny Gutierrez, 25, and Steve Markow, 24, prowled the hotel’s floors, confronting a suspected cocaine dealer and a heroin user, but making no arrests.

At each turn of a corridor, the two officers would stop, caution a reporter to stay back and then, taking off their caps so as not to tip their presence, peeked around corners.

As they walked along, they recounted the numerous previous arrests they had made there for buying and using crack. On the hotel’s eighth floor, Gutierrez pointed out where a crack lab had been set up at one end of the corridor while the same dealer had a retail outlet in another room at the other end.

Corridors Relatively Quiet

Like the lobby, however, the corridors, with the exception of some children playing, were relatively quiet. A known heroin addict was stopped and questioned. A young man, walking down from the sixth floor, was asked if he lived there. “No,” he said, but he claimed that he was visiting a friend. He was observed later in a crack trafficking alleyway near the hotel.

“Every dope dealer who deals is locked in his room, tipped by the (security) guards,” Gutierrez complained.

Smith had underscored this point in his March declaration, asserting that “hotel security guards were warning cocaine dealers in the hotel . . . every time police entered the hotel.”

A hotel guard supervisor denied the officers’ assertions. “I’ve never seen that,” said Joe Castro, 24. Yacoobian also denied the claim.

Buyers and Sellers

As quiet as the hotel was, the Alexandria’s neighborhood was teeming with buyers and sellers of crack, the cheap cocaine byproduct that sells for about $8 to $10 a “rock.”

But despite the cheap price, “we routinely pick up crack dealers with $800 to $1,000 on them,” the proceeds of one night’s business, Central Division Sgt. Charles Mealey said.

After leaving the hotel, Gutierrez and Markow attacked the nearby crack scene. Driving east on 6th Street, Gutierrez made a quick right turn into “Crack Alley,” as the cops call it, a major center of drug dealing and use. It is a foul-smelling concrete channel between 6th and 7th streets, straddling Broadway and Spring streets.

“Turn around, face the wall,” they yelled at suspects who had just lit rock cocaine stuffed into cheap plastic pipes. Six men and a woman were spread-eagled against a wall. But arrests were few that night as, almost by sleight-of-hand, traffickers and users tossed their crack and pipes as the police moved in.

Major Trouble Spot

The two officers searched each suspect, but detained only one thought to be a dealer. But he, too, was let go after a field interview card, containing background information on the suspect, was filled out.

At another major trouble spot, a doughnut shop across the street from the Alexandria, they spotted a lighter flickering in the dark shadows near the shop as a buyer lit his plastic pipe, the tip stuffed with diluted cocaine, or rock.

Racing on foot across the street, the two officers again lined up several men and women against a wall next to the shop.

How often does he take “hits”--street jargon for smoking crack, they asked a man in his early 40s, wearing a baggy sweater, dirty trousers and sneakers.

“Maybe 10 to 15 times a day,” the man replied. Why? they asked. “I’m alone and depressed,” he replied.

Crack Distribution Center

The corner where the doughnut shop is located, at 5th and Spring streets, is one of the city’s major crack distribution centers, according to police.

In the late evening hours, squad cars cruised by every few minutes. As the police approached, the dealers and buyers would quickly disperse, some taking refuge in the doughnut shop. But after each car left, they would emerge again from the shadows like moths drawn back to the yellow glare of the shop’s sign.

If the police appear relentless in their efforts to shut down crack traffic, the crack buyers and sellers appear as resolute to retain their turf.

In “Crack Alley,” dealers took to the offensive, pushing big metal trash bins into the middle of the dingy alley to block police cars’ entry. But the police kept attacking.

20-Page Declaration

Key to choking off the trafficking, police and the city attorney’s office believe, is sealing the Alexandria from drug dealers. In his 20-page declaration, Officer Smith said that he stalked the hotel’s corridors with four other Central Division officers.

What they saw and experienced, he charged, was a nightmare of crack production, sales and violence.

“I have made arrests on every floor of the Alexandria Hotel, including the barroom, roof and lower-level parking lot,” Smith said. “It is not uncommon to find suspects who live in different areas of the L.A. Basin and who travel to the Alexandria to sell narcotics.”

Indeed, declared Smith, as is the case outside the hotel on Spring Street, crack trafficking is as hectic during the day as it is at night.

“It is not uncommon to find business people roaming the halls of the Alexandria looking for a person to sell them narcotics. During the daytime hours, I’ve confronted well-dressed businessmen and women walking the hotel halls.

“After stopping these people and interviewing them, I have found that they were often local business professionals. . . . They did not have hotel room keys and stated they did not live in the hotel.

“Most would say, ‘I’m looking for a friend.’ ”

Drug ‘Supermarket’

Smith said that one narcotics suspect described the hotel as a drug “supermarket.” What’s more, he added, it could be a violent marketplace.

“There have been times that I have had to run after and then had altercations with violent cocaine dealers,” Smith said. “I have had three complete uniforms torn beyond repair by combative cocaine dealers. I have had my left middle finger bitten by a hostile cocaine dealer as I attempted to recover cocaine from his mouth. . . .

“There is no place inside the hotel that you cannot find evidence of narcotics use.”

On 5th Street, called “The Nickel” by old-timers, Smith said that “the majority of suspects that I have arrested . . . live or stay inside the Alexandria.”

Crime-Infested Street

In his second-floor office at the Alexandria, Martin Yacoobian Jr. observed that Spring Street had become so crime-infested that he will not walk the street alone--even during daylight hours. “I walk out there with the fear that something might happen,” he said.

But that does not mean that his hotel is a nest for drug traffickers and prostitutes, as police allege, he said.

About four out of every five of the hotel’s rooms, he said, are rented to “permanent residents”--some pensioners paying about $325 a month; others, low-income families whose breadwinners work downtown, pay about $400 monthly.

His 63-year-old father, he said, came to Los Angeles from Detroit in 1944 with his savings in his pockets and, beginning in the late 1950s, began acquiring downtown hotels: the King Edward, Baltimore, Leland and, finally, in 1979, the Alexandria, which he bought for about $5 million.

‘Heart and Soul’

He said that these hotels provide almost 1,500 permanent residential rooms for senior citizens on fixed low incomes.

“Dad’s heart and soul has been in downtown Los Angeles since 1944,” his son said.

Yacoobian, 36, heatedly denied charges by the city attorney that his family neglected the hotel to a point where it has become, in effect, a drug-dealing center. His mother and father, he said, have attempted to upgrade the aging Alexandria by pumping $3.5 million worth of repairs into it.

Now, he said, he is trying to evict a juice bar that rents ground floor space from the hotel and which police have charged is another big crack trouble spot.

“If he gets rid of that, it would be a big plus,” Officer Smith said.

In a Nov. 23 response to police allegations about the hotel, Yacoobian’s father, Martin Sr., wrote a Central Area captain that the Alexandria was headed in a “very positive direction” until two years ago when narcotics traffic began to intensify around the hotel.

“As a result of this,” he wrote, “I have, once again, been fighting an uphill battle.”